Her words faltered as another group of Rovers walked out of the surging mass of the dead. There were five of them in protective clothes smeared with infected blood. Untouched. Unmolested by the monsters because they, too, smelled dead. They ran in a knot, outpacing the zombies and the Rovers pushing the carts as they dashed toward the walls. Two of them carried rifles, but Dahlia didn’t care about that. It was the other three that really scared her. They carried larger weapons, running with them in both hands. Like oversized rifles but with a big bulbous thing sticking out of the barrel. Dahlia knew what they were. She’d seen movies. She’d watched news footage of the wars in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.

She knew what a rocket propelled grenade was.

Just as she knew that the walls of Happy Valley were not built to withstand that kind of attack.

Not one chance in hell.

— 43 —: THE WARRIOR WOMAN, THE SOLDIER, AND THE DOG

— 43 —

THE WARRIOR WOMAN, THE SOLDIER, AND THE DOG

I didn’t think a straight run to town was the smart move. Turns out I was right, but not for the reasons I thought.

The obvious danger was packs of Rovers. That would have been bad enough, but when there were brief pauses in the sounds of whistles we heard something else. Actually, Baskerville smelled it first and went rigid with tension. We stopped, crouching on either side of him, listening.

There it was.

The moans. It was like a wave of sound that seemed to come from everywhere. Birds fled from the trees and escaped into the western skies. A pair of deer bolted from within a nest of fallen branches and ran like mad past us. Squirrels chittered as they ran from tree to tree. Everything that lived in these woods and had enough intelligence to be frightened was fleeing. The moans, and the dark intent implied by that sound, seemed to chase them.

“God,” breathed Rachael. “Orcs.”

“A whole goddamn lot of them,” I agreed.

Suddenly the woods transformed from being a cloud of relative safety inside which we could hide and move, to a cloth of sickness into which we were sewn as fragile threads. I checked my ammunition. Two full magazines and a third with seven rounds. Rachael had a shotgun from one of the townies, but it was a single shot version and there were four rounds plus one in the breech. Not enough for a war, and too loud to risk using.

I tapped her shoulder and we moved off. Every now and then we caught glimpses of the horde—that’s the only word that really fit—and it chilled us.

“How can there be this many of them?” asked Rachael as we ran. “And why are they all heading toward the town?” Then she raised her head as a fresh burst of whistles filled the air. “Oh,” she said, then amended it. “Oh god.”